Force Science News #68
March 26, 2007
=======================================
The Force Science News is provided by The Force Science Research Center, a
non-profit institution based at Minnesota State University, Mankato.
Subscriptions are free and sent via e-mail. To register for your free,
direct-delivery subscription, please visit www.forcesciencenews.com and
click on the registration button. For reprint clearance, please e-mail:
[email protected].
=======================================
HOW MANY OF THESE FORCE MYTHS DO YOU BELIEVE?
HOW ABOUT THE PEOPLE WHO JUDGE YOU?
Part 1 of a 2-part series
Civilians who judge the reasonableness of your use of force, whether they're
members of the media, of a review board, of a prosecutor's staff, or of a
jury, are likely to bring a welter of highly distorted beliefs to the
process because they've undergone thousands of hours of "training" based on
fantasy rather than the "seething ferocity and violence" of street-level
reality.
The perpetrators and victims of these misconceptions "do not understand or
appreciate the physics and dynamics of how force works," says Det. Cmdr.
Jeffry Johnson of the Long Beach (CA) PD, author of a recent insightful
report on force mythology. This "can lead to serious problems" because the
same real-life force incidents that are viewed by law enforcement as
perfectly reasonable may be seen by many gullible but influential civilians
as unreasonable and excessive, "particularly in high-profile or video-taped"
encounters.
"Police officers often forget that most people do not share their experience
and knowledge of how force works," Johnson writes.
Moreover, as Johnson can testify from harrowing personal experience,
otherwise savvy officers themselves sometimes unwittingly buy in to some of
the common civilian delusions. And this can lead to potentially dangerous
expectations, confusion, and loss of confidence in the midst of
life-threatening confrontations.
What's needed, Johnson believes, is for the policing profession to work more
diligently to educate the public--and itself--about force truths, while
simultaneously reasserting its rightful role as interpreter and arbiter of
what constitutes reasonable force applications.
Johnson's report, titled "Use of Force and the Hollywood Factor," first
appeared in the Journal of California Law Enforcement. You can read it now
in its entirety on the website of Americans for Effective Law Enforcement:
http://www.aele.org/law/2007-04MLJ501.pdf
Twenty-five years ago, public perceptions about LE force were "not a major
issue," Johnson writes, because "few people had seen an actual use-of-force
incident." If a force application was scrutinized, "it was normally done on
the basis of a police report or witness testimony." He told Force Science
News, "People didn't see the starkness and ugliness of force. And it is
ugly. There's no way you can make it pretty."
Beginning with Rodney King, the increasingly ubiquitous video camera has
effectively taken "the force incident off the cold, sterile pages of the
police report and brought all of its seething ferocity and violence into the
living rooms of the general public," Johnson notes.
This has produced core conflicts between unappetizing street truths and the
sanitized depictions with which people have been indoctrinated since
childhood by movies, TV, and now video games. People "truly believe they
understand" how force works and should look, based on the thousands of
fictional versions they've seen, Johnson explains. "Many also base their
ideas of the rules, laws, policies, and morality that govern police force"
on these same perceptions. But...they're dead wrong.
Johnson identifies 3 predominant Hollywood myths impacting the public view
of force reasonableness:
THE DEMONSTRATIVE BULLET FALLACY.
In other words, bullets vividly demonstrate when and where they strike a
human target because the subject "will jerk convulsively, go flying through
windows [or] off balconies, or lose limbs, and there will immediately emerge
a geyser of blood spewing forth from his wound.... This concept is
reinforced by various firearm and shooting magazines that discuss and
propagate the idea of handgun 'knockdown power' and 'one-shot stopping
power.'"
Johnson experienced this myth first hand as a patrol officer the night he
and his partner were threatened by a shotgun-toting, PCP-fueled hostage
taker. "I was shooting with a .45-cal. Colt revolver, a gun I thought would
blow him off his feet, and nothing happened. I put 4 rounds in him--broke
his femur and penetrated his heart--but there was no movement I could see
and no blood. It was extremely traumatic. I thought the only way I could
stop him was to put a round in his head," which Johnson, a master shooter,
managed to do with the last bullet in his cylinder.
Other officers with similar experiences have told him how startled and
stressed they were when their expectations of instant stopping proved false
in the middle of a gunfight.
On the other hand, officers sometimes react to receiving fire "based on how
they believe the dynamics of the force should work rather than how they
actually do." For example, the Secret Service agent who famously took a
.22-cal. bullet for President Reagan "jerked quite noticeably as he observed
the bullet strike him in the lower torso." Johnson has seen the
Demonstrative Bullet myth "even among armorers and range officers," he told
FSN.
In reality, as an FBI report on the subject put it, "A bullet simply cannot
knock a man down. If it had the energy to do so, then equal energy would be
applied against the shooter and he too would be knocked down. This is simple
physics, and has been known for hundreds of years."
Indeed, "the 'stopping power' of a 9mm bullet at muzzle velocity is equal to
a one-pound weight (e.g., a baseball) being dropped from the height of 6
feet," Johnson writes. "A .45 ACP bullet impact would equal that same object
dropped from 11.4 feet. That is a far cry from what Hollywood would have us
believe.
"nless the bullet destroys or damages the central nervous system (i.e.,
brain or upper spinal cord), incapacitation...can take a long time," easily
10-15 seconds even after a suspect's heart has been destroyed. "[T]he body
will rarely involuntarily move or jerk, and usually there is no...[readily
evident] surface tearing of tissue. Often there is no blood whatsoever....
[A]n officer can easily empty a full 17-round magazine before he or she
observes any indication of incapacitation." With more than one officer
shooting, "that total may reasonably increase exponentially." This contrasts
sharply to the "'one-shot drop' mentality the movies have created."
Too often officers' judgment is questioned when it appears they have fired
"too many rounds" at a suspect, Johnson charges. He recalls the
controversial case of Amadou Diallo, at whom 4 NYPD officers shot 41 rounds,
resulting in "serious rioting, public protest," and criminal charges against
the officers. A medical examiner testified that Diallo was still standing
upright when most of the fatal rounds hit him. "Do you think an
understanding of the Demonstrative Bullet Fallacy might make a difference in
the way the public views such incidents?" Johnson asks.
THE CODE OF THE WEST.
"From the earliest days of filmmaking, Hollywood has instilled in us that
there is an unwritten code that all good guys must live by," Johnson writes.
"The code may not always make much sense in the real world, but it has
created an implied expectation for real law enforcement." He cites 9
examples related to force, including:
--Good guys never have the advantage. "[F]ate places them in hopeless,
outgunned situations from which they ultimately triumph." With this mind,
how can an officer reasonably strike, pepper spray, or shoot an unarmed
suspect?
--Good guys are always outnumbered. "The image of the lone hero facing
numerous villains is pervasive in the movies. The real-life spectacle of
numerous officers standing over a suspect, attempting to control him (e.g.,
Rodney King) just feels wrong, based on this standard."
--Good guys are never the aggressor. Yet in real life, "officers must often
be the aggressors to maintain control."
--Good guys never shoot first or throw the first punch. In real life, an
officer "must anticipate a suspect's actions" and not wait until
"incapacitated by a bullet or knocked unconscious by a punch." To
effectively control a volatile situation, an officer may need to take down,
electronically neutralize, or even shoot a suspect before the subject has
shown any physical aggression. "[T]his will always look bad to untrained"
observers.
--Good guys will always outlast bad guys in a fight. Actually, an officer
has only "a short time--maybe a couple of minutes--to gain control of a
suspect before the officer's energy is spent, placing him or her at a
dangerous disadvantage." Officers in a protracted struggle may need to use
"increasing levels of force...the closer they get to their fatigue
threshold." Once that threshold is reached or passed without the resisting
suspect being restrained, "the officer may easily be overcome, then injured
or killed."
--Good guys never shoot a person in the back. "This may be the best-known
and most oft-quoted Code of the West...proof that the shooting was
unjustifiable and unreasonable." Yet there are "a myriad of scenarios in
which an officer is perfectly justified in shooting a suspect in the back,"
including the situation in which a suspect presents a frontal threat to an
officer then turns to run away just as the officer reacts.
"The reality is a gunshot wound to the back only proves where the bullet
struck. It provides no more evidence of culpability than does a gunshot
wound to the front, side, big toe, or anywhere else," Johnson declares.
VIOLENT POLICE - VIOLENT BUSINESS.
This final myth has officers flying "from call to call shooting and beating
people" and causes one to "wonder how Hollywood cops ever get caught up on
their paperwork," Johnson writes.
"The fact is, [real] police rarely use force." Statistically, law officers
"do not use force 99.9639%" of their calls for service. Further, in only a
fraction of all cases where force is used--about 0.2%--do officers use
deadly force. "And it is still true that the vast majority of officers (even
in major cities) never fire their weapons on duty.
"The fact that law enforcement uses force so sparingly should be highlighted
as a sign of success," Johnson argues. "Yet if Hollywood, the nightly news,
and some vocal activists are to be believed, one would think the police
shoot and beat people as often as they start up their black and whites."
Dr. Bill Lewinski, executive director of the Force Science Research Center
at Minnesota State University-Mankato, discusses the damaging impact of
myths on officers' physical, emotional, and legal survival in his Force
Science seminars, and he concurs with Johnson's conclusions about the
dangers of the Hollywood Factor.
"It is not an exaggeration," he told FSN, "to say that many officers receive
more training from Hollywood by a thousand-fold than they do from any force
instructor. To cite just one consequence, the dangerous tactic of holding
your handgun up beside your head while searching a building or making
entry--the so-called Hollywood high-guard--is not taught by any academy I
know of in this country. But cops do it because they're been 'instructed' to
by TV and movies.
"Some officers have been so convinced of their invulnerability by Hollywood
depictions by that they've been unwilling to do the realistic training
necessary for their survival in a showdown." And, as Cmdr. Johnson points
out, even the most dedicated officers are at risk in the legal arena after a
use of force because many of the civilians who are in position to judge
their actions believe they know much more about officer-involved shootings
than they actually do, thanks to Hollywood brainwashing."
Lewinski explains that one of FSRC's important goals is to educate the
public about the true dynamics of force encounters. In Johnson's opinion,
that's a goal LE itself also needs to be more proactive in pushing.
Police managers can no longer afford to "allow the untrained, often
misinformed public to be the final judge of what constitutes reasonable
police force, particularly in high-profile incidents, without insisting on
even a rudimentary understanding of force dynamics," he insists. Nor can
they afford to continue allowing "the community to maintain unreasonable and
conflicting expectations of its law enforcement officers."
He addresses some strategies for action in Part 2 of this 2-part series.
[Our thanks to Wayne Schmidt, executive director of Americans for Effective
Law Enforcement, for tipping us to Cmdr. Johnson's provocative report.]
================
(c) 2007: Force Science Research Center, www.forcescience.org. Reprints
allowed by request. For reprint clearance, please e-mail:
[email protected]. FORCE SCIENCE is a registered trademark of The
Force Science Research Center, a non-profit organization based at Minnesota
State University, Mankato.
================
March 26, 2007
=======================================
The Force Science News is provided by The Force Science Research Center, a
non-profit institution based at Minnesota State University, Mankato.
Subscriptions are free and sent via e-mail. To register for your free,
direct-delivery subscription, please visit www.forcesciencenews.com and
click on the registration button. For reprint clearance, please e-mail:
[email protected].
=======================================
HOW MANY OF THESE FORCE MYTHS DO YOU BELIEVE?
HOW ABOUT THE PEOPLE WHO JUDGE YOU?
Part 1 of a 2-part series
Civilians who judge the reasonableness of your use of force, whether they're
members of the media, of a review board, of a prosecutor's staff, or of a
jury, are likely to bring a welter of highly distorted beliefs to the
process because they've undergone thousands of hours of "training" based on
fantasy rather than the "seething ferocity and violence" of street-level
reality.
The perpetrators and victims of these misconceptions "do not understand or
appreciate the physics and dynamics of how force works," says Det. Cmdr.
Jeffry Johnson of the Long Beach (CA) PD, author of a recent insightful
report on force mythology. This "can lead to serious problems" because the
same real-life force incidents that are viewed by law enforcement as
perfectly reasonable may be seen by many gullible but influential civilians
as unreasonable and excessive, "particularly in high-profile or video-taped"
encounters.
"Police officers often forget that most people do not share their experience
and knowledge of how force works," Johnson writes.
Moreover, as Johnson can testify from harrowing personal experience,
otherwise savvy officers themselves sometimes unwittingly buy in to some of
the common civilian delusions. And this can lead to potentially dangerous
expectations, confusion, and loss of confidence in the midst of
life-threatening confrontations.
What's needed, Johnson believes, is for the policing profession to work more
diligently to educate the public--and itself--about force truths, while
simultaneously reasserting its rightful role as interpreter and arbiter of
what constitutes reasonable force applications.
Johnson's report, titled "Use of Force and the Hollywood Factor," first
appeared in the Journal of California Law Enforcement. You can read it now
in its entirety on the website of Americans for Effective Law Enforcement:
http://www.aele.org/law/2007-04MLJ501.pdf
Twenty-five years ago, public perceptions about LE force were "not a major
issue," Johnson writes, because "few people had seen an actual use-of-force
incident." If a force application was scrutinized, "it was normally done on
the basis of a police report or witness testimony." He told Force Science
News, "People didn't see the starkness and ugliness of force. And it is
ugly. There's no way you can make it pretty."
Beginning with Rodney King, the increasingly ubiquitous video camera has
effectively taken "the force incident off the cold, sterile pages of the
police report and brought all of its seething ferocity and violence into the
living rooms of the general public," Johnson notes.
This has produced core conflicts between unappetizing street truths and the
sanitized depictions with which people have been indoctrinated since
childhood by movies, TV, and now video games. People "truly believe they
understand" how force works and should look, based on the thousands of
fictional versions they've seen, Johnson explains. "Many also base their
ideas of the rules, laws, policies, and morality that govern police force"
on these same perceptions. But...they're dead wrong.
Johnson identifies 3 predominant Hollywood myths impacting the public view
of force reasonableness:
THE DEMONSTRATIVE BULLET FALLACY.
In other words, bullets vividly demonstrate when and where they strike a
human target because the subject "will jerk convulsively, go flying through
windows [or] off balconies, or lose limbs, and there will immediately emerge
a geyser of blood spewing forth from his wound.... This concept is
reinforced by various firearm and shooting magazines that discuss and
propagate the idea of handgun 'knockdown power' and 'one-shot stopping
power.'"
Johnson experienced this myth first hand as a patrol officer the night he
and his partner were threatened by a shotgun-toting, PCP-fueled hostage
taker. "I was shooting with a .45-cal. Colt revolver, a gun I thought would
blow him off his feet, and nothing happened. I put 4 rounds in him--broke
his femur and penetrated his heart--but there was no movement I could see
and no blood. It was extremely traumatic. I thought the only way I could
stop him was to put a round in his head," which Johnson, a master shooter,
managed to do with the last bullet in his cylinder.
Other officers with similar experiences have told him how startled and
stressed they were when their expectations of instant stopping proved false
in the middle of a gunfight.
On the other hand, officers sometimes react to receiving fire "based on how
they believe the dynamics of the force should work rather than how they
actually do." For example, the Secret Service agent who famously took a
.22-cal. bullet for President Reagan "jerked quite noticeably as he observed
the bullet strike him in the lower torso." Johnson has seen the
Demonstrative Bullet myth "even among armorers and range officers," he told
FSN.
In reality, as an FBI report on the subject put it, "A bullet simply cannot
knock a man down. If it had the energy to do so, then equal energy would be
applied against the shooter and he too would be knocked down. This is simple
physics, and has been known for hundreds of years."
Indeed, "the 'stopping power' of a 9mm bullet at muzzle velocity is equal to
a one-pound weight (e.g., a baseball) being dropped from the height of 6
feet," Johnson writes. "A .45 ACP bullet impact would equal that same object
dropped from 11.4 feet. That is a far cry from what Hollywood would have us
believe.
"nless the bullet destroys or damages the central nervous system (i.e.,
brain or upper spinal cord), incapacitation...can take a long time," easily
10-15 seconds even after a suspect's heart has been destroyed. "[T]he body
will rarely involuntarily move or jerk, and usually there is no...[readily
evident] surface tearing of tissue. Often there is no blood whatsoever....
[A]n officer can easily empty a full 17-round magazine before he or she
observes any indication of incapacitation." With more than one officer
shooting, "that total may reasonably increase exponentially." This contrasts
sharply to the "'one-shot drop' mentality the movies have created."
Too often officers' judgment is questioned when it appears they have fired
"too many rounds" at a suspect, Johnson charges. He recalls the
controversial case of Amadou Diallo, at whom 4 NYPD officers shot 41 rounds,
resulting in "serious rioting, public protest," and criminal charges against
the officers. A medical examiner testified that Diallo was still standing
upright when most of the fatal rounds hit him. "Do you think an
understanding of the Demonstrative Bullet Fallacy might make a difference in
the way the public views such incidents?" Johnson asks.
THE CODE OF THE WEST.
"From the earliest days of filmmaking, Hollywood has instilled in us that
there is an unwritten code that all good guys must live by," Johnson writes.
"The code may not always make much sense in the real world, but it has
created an implied expectation for real law enforcement." He cites 9
examples related to force, including:
--Good guys never have the advantage. "[F]ate places them in hopeless,
outgunned situations from which they ultimately triumph." With this mind,
how can an officer reasonably strike, pepper spray, or shoot an unarmed
suspect?
--Good guys are always outnumbered. "The image of the lone hero facing
numerous villains is pervasive in the movies. The real-life spectacle of
numerous officers standing over a suspect, attempting to control him (e.g.,
Rodney King) just feels wrong, based on this standard."
--Good guys are never the aggressor. Yet in real life, "officers must often
be the aggressors to maintain control."
--Good guys never shoot first or throw the first punch. In real life, an
officer "must anticipate a suspect's actions" and not wait until
"incapacitated by a bullet or knocked unconscious by a punch." To
effectively control a volatile situation, an officer may need to take down,
electronically neutralize, or even shoot a suspect before the subject has
shown any physical aggression. "[T]his will always look bad to untrained"
observers.
--Good guys will always outlast bad guys in a fight. Actually, an officer
has only "a short time--maybe a couple of minutes--to gain control of a
suspect before the officer's energy is spent, placing him or her at a
dangerous disadvantage." Officers in a protracted struggle may need to use
"increasing levels of force...the closer they get to their fatigue
threshold." Once that threshold is reached or passed without the resisting
suspect being restrained, "the officer may easily be overcome, then injured
or killed."
--Good guys never shoot a person in the back. "This may be the best-known
and most oft-quoted Code of the West...proof that the shooting was
unjustifiable and unreasonable." Yet there are "a myriad of scenarios in
which an officer is perfectly justified in shooting a suspect in the back,"
including the situation in which a suspect presents a frontal threat to an
officer then turns to run away just as the officer reacts.
"The reality is a gunshot wound to the back only proves where the bullet
struck. It provides no more evidence of culpability than does a gunshot
wound to the front, side, big toe, or anywhere else," Johnson declares.
VIOLENT POLICE - VIOLENT BUSINESS.
This final myth has officers flying "from call to call shooting and beating
people" and causes one to "wonder how Hollywood cops ever get caught up on
their paperwork," Johnson writes.
"The fact is, [real] police rarely use force." Statistically, law officers
"do not use force 99.9639%" of their calls for service. Further, in only a
fraction of all cases where force is used--about 0.2%--do officers use
deadly force. "And it is still true that the vast majority of officers (even
in major cities) never fire their weapons on duty.
"The fact that law enforcement uses force so sparingly should be highlighted
as a sign of success," Johnson argues. "Yet if Hollywood, the nightly news,
and some vocal activists are to be believed, one would think the police
shoot and beat people as often as they start up their black and whites."
Dr. Bill Lewinski, executive director of the Force Science Research Center
at Minnesota State University-Mankato, discusses the damaging impact of
myths on officers' physical, emotional, and legal survival in his Force
Science seminars, and he concurs with Johnson's conclusions about the
dangers of the Hollywood Factor.
"It is not an exaggeration," he told FSN, "to say that many officers receive
more training from Hollywood by a thousand-fold than they do from any force
instructor. To cite just one consequence, the dangerous tactic of holding
your handgun up beside your head while searching a building or making
entry--the so-called Hollywood high-guard--is not taught by any academy I
know of in this country. But cops do it because they're been 'instructed' to
by TV and movies.
"Some officers have been so convinced of their invulnerability by Hollywood
depictions by that they've been unwilling to do the realistic training
necessary for their survival in a showdown." And, as Cmdr. Johnson points
out, even the most dedicated officers are at risk in the legal arena after a
use of force because many of the civilians who are in position to judge
their actions believe they know much more about officer-involved shootings
than they actually do, thanks to Hollywood brainwashing."
Lewinski explains that one of FSRC's important goals is to educate the
public about the true dynamics of force encounters. In Johnson's opinion,
that's a goal LE itself also needs to be more proactive in pushing.
Police managers can no longer afford to "allow the untrained, often
misinformed public to be the final judge of what constitutes reasonable
police force, particularly in high-profile incidents, without insisting on
even a rudimentary understanding of force dynamics," he insists. Nor can
they afford to continue allowing "the community to maintain unreasonable and
conflicting expectations of its law enforcement officers."
He addresses some strategies for action in Part 2 of this 2-part series.
[Our thanks to Wayne Schmidt, executive director of Americans for Effective
Law Enforcement, for tipping us to Cmdr. Johnson's provocative report.]
================
(c) 2007: Force Science Research Center, www.forcescience.org. Reprints
allowed by request. For reprint clearance, please e-mail:
[email protected]. FORCE SCIENCE is a registered trademark of The
Force Science Research Center, a non-profit organization based at Minnesota
State University, Mankato.
================
